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Today we are announcing the biggest entrepreneurial program ever
launched – Startup
Weekend Next. A partnership
of Startup Weekend, Startup America, TechStars and Udacity, Startup Weekend
Next brings four weeks of amazing hands-on training
learning to build your startup to cities around the
world.Our goal– to inspire, educate and empower
hundred’s of thousands of entrepreneurs and help create 10,000
startups.

The Lean LaunchPadClassYou may have read my previous posts about the Lean LaunchPad
entrepreneurship class. The class teaches founders how to
dramatically reduce their failure rate through the combination of
business model design, customer development and agile development
using the Startup Owners Manual. Just a
crazy idea two years ago, the class is now taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia, Caltech, Princeton
and for the National Science Foundation at
the University of Michigan and Georgia Tech.

While the Lean LaunchPad online has received rave reviews (it’s being
translated into Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese and Greek, and
it’s being used as part of a “flipped classroom” in other entrepreneurship
courses), it’s different than taking the class in person. It
doesn’t require you to form a team, and there’s no immediate
instructor feedback. More importantly, it makes no demands of you
to stand and deliver your weekly customer development progress in
front of your peers. In sum, it lacks the rigorous and
collaborative hands-on experience that entrepreneurs get in our
university classes.

We thought long and hard about how we could take the Lean
LaunchPad Online to the next level and deliver the same
level of experiential instruction to tens and hundreds of
thousands of entrepreneurs around the world.

The result – Startup Weekend Next.

Hands-On in 100’s of CitiesStartup
Weekend Next is a four-week version of the
Lean LaunchPad class with hands-on instructors and
mentors – and we will teach it in hundreds of cities around the
world.

I’m partnered with four great organizations to deliver the
program. The class is organized, led and delivered by Startup
Weekend, the global non-profit that teaches entrepreneurs how
to launch a startup in 54 hours. They’ve hosted close to 800
Startup Weekend events in over 350 cities worldwide educating a
staggering 57,000 entrepreneurs who’ve created over 5,000
startups. Today they are going to take Startup Weekend to the
next level by organizing and teaching a four-week version of the
Lean LaunchPad class as their Startup Weekend
Next course. Their reach and scale
means our goal of helping to create 10,000 startups is within our
grasp.

In addition, the leading experts in building entrepreneurial
companies and regions, TechStars and Startup America are partnering with us in
this endeavor.

In the U.S, Startup America will leverage its network of 30
startup regions to engage entrepreneurial leaders throughout the
country. And TechStars will use its broad and unparalleled network of mentors
(experienced entrepreneurs and investors) to coach the teams.
And Udacity has put their awesome production
resources behind the class and hosts the Lean LaunchPad online
lectures. And we are looking for other partners worldwide
to help make this successful.

The first four-week Startup Weekend Next classes will start
on Nov. 28 in more than 25 cities worldwide. The program expands
to all of Startup Weekend’s 350 member communities in 2013 where
it will be offered up to five times a year in each city.

The cost of attending a Startup Weekend Next is ridiculously
inexpensive. It doesn’t take equity and just has a small fee that
varies by city ($140 to $299), to cover event operations and
expenses.

How it WorksWe now know how to crack the
entrepreneurial code by creating an Entrepreneurship
API - a standard language for entrepreneurs. When you
leave the class, you’ll know how to think about your startup in
the now standard “language” of the business model canvas. You’ll understand the
customer development process used to test
those hypotheses and learn how to iterate or pivot when your
hypotheses need to change. And you’ll learn about how to
build a minimal viable product to get feedback early
and often from customers.

Repeat for four weeks– all while working with volunteer
mentor partners from Startup Weekend, Startup America and TechStars –
serial entrepreneurs and seasoned startup investors – to see
whether your business idea was truly a vision or simply a
hallucination.

The Big Idea – Incubators – Accelerators – and Something
NewIn the last decade startupincubators have become increasingly popular.
These incubators which provides new startups
with year-round physical office space, infrastructure and advice
in exchange for a fee (often in equity.) They may be privately run but often are
non-profit, attached to a university or in some locations a local
government. There is no formal “start date” so there is a
no fixed time for their stay. (For some incubators, entrepreneurs
can stay as long as they want.) There is no curriculum and seldom
any formal instructors or mentors. There is no guaranteed
funding. Think of incubators as “shelter from the storm.”

In contrast, the goal of an accelerator is not
physical office space, it’s a fundable company. Startups enter and leave as a cohort (starting
and ending the program at the same time) in a program of a set
length. While there is no formal curriculum, most offer weekly
expert lectures, experienced mentors, coaching and introductions.
Accelerators provide funding at the end of the program.
Getting into an accelerator is more competitive than grad
school.

Like an accelerator there is no physical office space, and
startups enter and leave as a cohort in a program of a set
length. But the key difference is that Startup Weekend Next
engages you in a formalcurriculum. We believe we know what startups need to
learn, and we focus on teaching you that. Instead of guest lecturers, you get out of the
building and you learn by doing. Like the best
accelerators, you get experienced mentors, coaching and
introductions. Unlike accelerators, there is no funding at the
end of the program. But you leave knowing a lot more of
what it takes to build a company beyond a PowerPoint deck for a
VC presentation.